PrivTracker – Private BitTorrent tracker for everyone
12 comments
·January 11, 2025frizlab
Love this. I continue to believe Torrenting is the best way to share files, particularly big files, rather than uploading them to some cloud instance with questionable privacy policies…
franczesko
P2P is such an underrated tech
Pooge
Is there a self-hostable BitTorrent tracker that can run with Docker? I know there's an option on qBittorrent but I don't want my server to run a full BitTorrent client; just the tracker.
haunter
sqtracker https://github.com/tdjsnelling/sqtracker
Pooge
I've heard of this, but I don't mind anyone with the tracker URI to be able to connect to it. sqtracker is a full-blown system to run a private tracker with user and ratio management, which is overkill in my case.
Others might find the link useful, though!
haunter
How about webtorrent's tracker? There is no Docker file but it should be doable https://github.com/webtorrent/bittorrent-tracker
beardog
Remember to disable the dht if you use this.
null
Pooge
Unneeded; checking "Private torrent" when creating a torrent means that it won't connect you to the DHT.
cbg0
For the less technically inclined folks that don't trust this hosted service or can't host their own it's probably simpler to just use a seedbox if you need to access torrented files from multiple locations or you want to share them with others.
Pooge
This is not what this project is about. You either need a tracker or register to DHT in order to connect to peers. Having a seedbox has nothing to do with that; you'd still either of those for your friends to connect to you and download your files.
Worth noting if someone uses this to share private data: Checking the "Private torrent" would tell your and compliant clients to not use DHT and other public methods that can leak the content. But it doesn't stop other non-compliant clients from sharing it on the DHT once they have it, nor does it stop someone from just ticking "Enable DHT" on their side once they have received it (or change "private" to "false" in the torrent file itself).
Obvious to many I'm sure, but maybe best to be explicit about it anyways.
Slightly off-topic but fitting: How does infohash v2 support look like today? It's been available for years, but seemingly most private trackers + most other places seems to still be using v1. What clients are people using today, do those support v2? As far as I know, all modern clients do, so it would be possible to start using v2 exclusively.
Reason for the question is that I'm planning to distribute many large files to the public, and in my experience, BitTorrent works really well for that. Question is if it's enough to just publish v2 infohashes, or I need to publish both v1 and v2.